Gender Equality Versus Minority Inclusion: The Political Dilemma of Religious Arbitration
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper examines the recent trend toward the partial incorporation of religious law in Western democracies through the vehicle of arbitration provisions. In the Canadian province of Ontario, an arbitration law that allowed the resolution of disputes according to religious (or other) laws became controversial when it was taken up by Muslims in late 2003; the public discovery in 2008 that shari’a-based arbitration could carry weight in English courts likewise has been a source of controversy in the United Kingdom. In both cases, opponents of religious arbitration portrayed it as antithetical to women’s equality before the law, and thus impermissible in a democracy. Advocates, on the other hand, often cite the inclusion and religious freedom of minorities as justifications for some accommodation of religious law. The question of religious law’s proper role in a democratic system is an interesting and politically important one, with no consistent treatment yet emerging from cases where the controversy has arisen. Ontario ended its recognition of religious arbitration, while Britain seems to be taking the reverse approach. Both cases raise important questions for democracy, and this study seeks to clarify the issues at stake and analyze the practice of religious arbitration in terms of democratic politics.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.011 | 0.013 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.012 | 0.031 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".